Labor Day Sweeping and Shelves

Sometimes

you need a little sass in your work.

like when you are sweeping oodles of little stink bugs out of your garage
to make room

for a bigger mess!

and little helpers

Did you know? Gramm and Pop decided this year the girls needed a swing set for their birthdays! When Gramm was in town in July she and Mommy looked online for the perfect set. We looked, and looked, found a few, but knew we needed to clear it with Daddy. See all the sets...metal or wood require *some assembly*.
Gramm thought a metal one would be a great starter set, but Mommy was concerned these fussy monkeys might not want anything to do with hot metal in the summer, and cold metal in the winter. Did you know you can get an amazing wooden play/swing set for little more than the price of the metal ones?
Yep! And Daddy agreed to assemble the set when it came in.
Gramm decided (since Mommy was so INdecisive) to leave Mommy with a budget and let her figure out which set was best.
And figure out she did!
Unfortunately, the set we researched (Daddy helped) and decided on...well it wasn't available when we finally decided to bite the bullet! So, we had to get a slightly bigger one. ;)
Grandma and Grandpa contributed, Uncle Matt contributed, and Mommy and Daddy picked up the difference.
The boxes came in a couple weeks ago...remember?
And today was the day to inventory parts and get to work.

What a mess!
Once we realized we had everything but 6 bolts (not too shabby for over 1,000 pieces of hardware and wood!), we sorted everything and got started.
Sorting was challenging since our wood kept disappearing...hmmm...

Once everything was piled up and accounted for- Mommy and Daddy got to building.
The girls rode their bikes and cars around the piles and *attempted* to stay out of the way.
Mostly they spent their time picking up individual pieces of wood and asking if they could have them.
When we managed to wrangle back all the important pieces, Madison said one of the boxes with her slide conveniently placed in the front was an airplane!

They used the boxes straps as seat belts and said they were flying to Grandma and Grandpa's house in South Carolina!

After lunch at their snack table and lots of running around, it was time for naps.
Madison moved a blanket down from her bed and said IT was now her airplane.
She asked if she and Kennedy could take a nap on their plane.
They were so cute snuggled up together I couldn't say no!

As we built, I took periodic breaks to check on them (yes, the monitor was on, what can I say...I'm a mom) They kept rolling over and wiggling around, but always the same way.

We got a nice base started before the girls went down.

but were quite impressed with how far we got while they slept.

Mommy laid out the wood, counted out the screws, bolts, nuts, and read the steps to Daddy, he did the hard part. This deceptive picture is just Daddy making sure each wood screw is level with the wood. Everything else was done with his handy dandy screw gun. Whew- putting the entire thing together by hand would be insane!

Here's our progress at the end of the day!

Madison kept asking what we were making. Daddy told her it was another special shelf for the garage to store things.
She seems to be buying it for now, but is definitely skeptical!